One year later

As I pack for another trip to sask, 12 months after my tick bite in the exact same location, I have a few things on my mind. 

I spent most of last year in a health sort of confusion. June- September I was feeling varying degrees of weird symptoms (joint pain, moving rashes, skin going numb, headaches, really tired, confused), and varying degrees of fear of the possibilities. For 6 weeks I was convinced I had rheumatoid arthritis and I’d never be able to take the stairs without pain again. Then in the fall when things got progressively worse I joined team Parasite. Obsessed with the idea that something invisible on the food I ate had poisoned me. Or maybe the kitty litter, maybe toxoplasmosis. 

Christmas Eve was when I connected all the dots. 

I wrote very detailed notes, read a book on how to get the proper diagnosis which encouraged me to make a spreadsheet with a timeline, went back through my photos of the summer noting all the possible places I could have contracted something. All of the above really narrowed it down. 

For some reason the tick bite had disappeared so deeply into my subconscious, I couldn’t grab it. And then the negative Lyme test from the doctor cemented it farther in. 

I remember the three realizations that did it.

1 - I was in bed trying to sleep when the memory of the tick bite entered my mind. I accessed something I’d hidden for some reason. I acknowledged that it could be because of that - but it was still 3 more months before I’d take it seriously.

2 - I was on the phone in the car while Henry slept, whispering to my doctor. She was urging me to get another Lyme test (from a lab in a different country - my nd had suggested it). But hadn’t my Doctor already given me two? Was she trying to tell me something without coming right out and saying it? She was. She knew something I didn’t know. About the tests. This was a big realization for me. It was a few weeks after the phone call that my brain decided to analyze that phone call because it felt off, it felt like a clue. Then it registered - if a doctor doesn't trust the test, then why should you?

3 - I took two different kinds of parasite meds and my symptoms remained. I took a comprehensive parasite test from the states and it said I had none. I rolled all that information around in my head for a few days and realized I’d been blinded by my own self-diagnosis. I was so convinced it was this, and now it wasn’t. It had to be the tick bite. In retrospect, it was probably both. Parasites and ticks go hand in hand. I simply killed them with the meds - then took the test - but the symptoms remaining were that of Lyme. 

All this to say, it's taken a year of mental and emotional energy to get where I am now. A lot of money I didn't have, but the money is nothing compared to being 100 percent healthy again, I'd give anything for that.  There's a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm 1/3 of my way through treatment. 

But I don't know how to not have a panic attack if I see one in the next 7 days.